Somil Mehta

Testing out the Point Relax TOX by @josefpelz for this Starry Night inspired patch. Sort of running in real time, two instances were a bit too much for my laptop. Hope you enjoy the Starry Night inspired color palette. Made in @touchdesigner . . . . . #touchdesigner #generativeart #creativecoding #particles #genartclub

Loving the new Field POP in @touchdesigner which lets me create these extrusions based on the outputs of my Quadtree shader. Movement by @noor.artpage

Realtime implementation of Multiscale Truchet Tiling by Chris Carlson. I love the emergent alien looking patterns that emerge from this. Built upon the foundations of a Quadtree compute shader. Which provides lots of flexibility as it outputs Position, Iteration Number, Scale and Texture Range all into a single POP. Movement by @framingmovessf Made in @touchdesigner . . . . #creativecoding #generativeart #algorithmicart #touchdesigner

When we build systems under constraint, they shape what we decide matters. The quadtree through recursive subdivision prioritizes uniformity over texture, sharp edges over gradients. It's an algorithm not shaped by how vision works but by computational limits of the 1970s. Exemplifying how design philosophy is often shaped by technical restraints. In 1974, Finkel and Bentley formalized the quadtree for organizing spatial data. By 1979, Hunter and Steiglitz adapted it for image processing tasks like edge detection, segmentation, and finding neighboring pixels. Break the image into quadrants, test each for uniformity, then subdivide where there's detail. CNNs eventually replaced quadtrees in computer vision, but the data structure persists in game engines, robotics and mapping systems. How much of computer vision is still shaped by what is computable rather than what's perceptual? Based on the Probabilistic Quadtree Shader by @ciphrd which was modified into a compute shader. Movement by @noor.artpage Developed for @wherethingsgo.official Made in @touchdesigner

> long thought piece : bodies, data, motion capture, aiaiai For *Where Things Go*, @ msomil and I have been experimenting with ways to capture movement and motion to visualize it in live performance. We work through the various attributes of choreographed movement, sometimes abstracting it to the physics of the motion and more so now working with full body three-dimensional representations. The pipeline remains more or less the same: dancer with or without a motion capture suit, data capture, skeletal reconstruction, cleanup and animation. With advances in motion capture tools like Move AI, QuickMagic,..., the process becomes accessible and eerily simpler[?] in some ways. With the pace of these new tools, the possibilities open up, especially for the animation field. @dancemagazine recently covered how AI motion capture is "making animating movement quicker, cheaper, and more accessible." If you squint though, here's what happens, especially in the most accessible free tier - your video gets processed and the movement is mapped onto a stock motion mesh. Probably modeled into a "generic" skeleton or a robot figure. You're reconfiguring your body to fit a standardized mesh. This is where the interrogation in process lies. Ten years ago [whaa], I was building motion capture repositories to analyze and pull out unique patterns in individual movement (swipe to #4 ✨). The central tension: how do you retain or highlight specificity in a system designed to flatten difference? Rewind more to Ghostcatching (1999) by Bill T. Jones, Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar. Ghostcatching captured Bill T. Jones's dancing body and transformed it into 3D drawings. They asked: "What is human movement abstracted from its original body? Can the drawn line carry the rhythm, weight, and intent of physical movement?" ✨ These interrogations, still stand > especially as the tools are continuously evolving. The accessibility matters, but so do the questions: What gets normalized in the name of that ease? Whose proportions are baked into the standardized digital avatars? Whose idea of movement or dance? How does technology impose its logic on how dance is seen, performed and remembered?

Supply chains, sentiment, and material obsolescence. Can you trace the invisible threads of your choices in the systems around us? ——— #WTG #dancetechnology #wherethingsgo #artandtechnology #unboxing #production #projectionmapping #multimediaarts #contemporarydanceproduction #artproduction

We met in September for a week to continue working on the foundations of Where Things Go. Where does the personal end and the global begin? What connects our intimate choices to invisible global networks? In this residency, we explored patterns and vocabularies of consumption cycles and personal stories. We investigated how systems might feed off of these patterns and our personal stories, and where agency lives within this consumption. We questioned our own complicity within the digital systems we are surrounded by, and how we negotiate our engagement. We worked through building narrative scripts, movement and sound scores, and visual motifs — bringing different lived perspectives to these questions. The work continues. 🟤 WTG Team - • Concept and Direction: @framingmovessf • Movement Collaborators: @noor.artpage @parth_2048 @jen_gerry • Creative Technologists: @msomil @vinaykhare_ • Music Composition: @khoparzi @mridangam_girl • Dramaturge: @akhshaygandhi • Documentation: @darshan_gaekwad • Video Editing: @noor.artpage • Venue support: @shoonyaspace #WTG #dancetechnology #wherethinhsgo #artandtechnology #unboxing #feministunboxing #production #projectionmapping #multimediaarts #contemporarydanceproduction #artproduction

Meet the ✨ Humans of ‘Where Things Go’ ✨ Somil Mehta 🧑‍💻 Somil is a designer turned creative technologist with a passion for crafting immersive and participatory experiences, performances and installations. Their practice is informed by an interdisciplinary and experimental approach drawing from the disciplines of creative coding, digital fabrication and spatial computing. They merge artistic expression and cutting edge tech to investigate relationships between people, technology and ecology. Past work includes creating immersive experiences installations for brands like Aether, Adobe, Armani Exchange and Coca Cola. Somil is our lead creative technologist, designing and developing the visual landscape of the WTG world-scape. What the audience sees is only a fraction of what brings a production to life—it’s the late-night conversations, the 5-hour deep dives into vision and possibility, the spaces in between where real creative magic happens. Somil inhabits these generative moments with exactly the right amount of sass and insight that makes our work truly tick. 🤖 #humansofwherethingsgo #wtg #wherethingsgo #production #art #generativeart #touchdesigner #tech #visual #creativetechnologist

Testing the limits of animated FBX instancing with POPs a slight variation on yesterday's sketch. Made with #Touchdesigner . . . . . . #TDPOPs #creativecodeart #genartclub #generativeart #new_media_art #animation #algorithmicart

3D Manhattan distances made with #POPs . Loving the new Proximity POP as well. Inspired by @as.ws__ 's sketches and as always made with #Touchdesigner . . . . . #creativecodeart #new_media_art #genartclub #visuals #algorithmicart #generativeart #visualfodder #madewithPOPs

Recreated path tracers entirely in POPs with a bit of GLSL assistance from @vincent.houze . As always made with @touchdesigner

Further explorations of the path tracer shader of @fabriceneyret ported from ShaderToy to @touchdesigner coupled with some particles. . . . . #new_media_art #proceduralart #generativeart #digitalart #touchdesigner #creativecoding #creativecodeart #glsl #shaders #particles #genartclub